Liz Allen: Professor meets his long-lost brother

On our family trip to the Outer Banks, a gaggle of grandkids climbed into a live oak (a Southern evergreen) for a "family tree" photo op.

Add my husband Eric's ninth grandchild, due in January, to my 13, we'd need a giant willow or redwood to seat all of our family.

Roy Strausbaugh's roots started simply. He's the only child of a couple who married in Manhattan's "Little Church Around the Corner," a favorite site for lovebirds to tie the knot.

When Roy was born two years later, his baby book says he weighed 4 pounds, 5 ounces. It records his first tooth, but the entries trail off.

The baby book, his parents' marriage license and Internet searches have helped Roy, 77, a college professor specializing in European diplomatic history, to reconstruct his family tree.

Roy's birth name was Melvin Roy McChesney, after his dad. But soon after his birth, his parents divorced, his father got custody and his mother was gone.

By age 1 1/2, Roy was living at his paternal grandparents' grand home in East Orange, N.J. When Roy was 5, his dad met another woman. "They get married, I have a new mother, she gets pregnant and they are living in Winchester, Va.," he says. His stepmother, Catherine Peters, had a sister, Irene, who was married to William Strausbaugh.

At age 6, during World War II, Roy was sent to live with the Strausbaughs in York for the summer. "The long and short of it is I never returned to my father and (step)mother," he says. His uncle by the second marriage was drafted, so he and his new Aunt Irene moved in with her parents -- also the parents of his stepmother. The Strausbaughs then adopted Roy.

He wasn't close to his adoptive father, but he treasured Irene. "She loved me dearly and I consider her my mother," he says.

He's certain that his mother, who was nearly 100 when she died four years ago, would have been delighted with developments that unfolded when Rosanna, his wife of 52 years, got a phone call about a year ago from a man researching his family on Ancestry.com.

"He says he's your half-brother," Rosanna told Roy.

The caller, Carl Veaux, is the son of Roy's biological mother, Angelica Swartz, and her second husband. After a year of phone calls, the brothers met in July, in Coral Gables, Fla., for Carl's 75th birthday. On Friday, Roy met his half-sister, Darriel, for lunch in Olean, N.Y.

Roy had only two photos of his first mother until Carl shared dozens. The resemblance is striking -- he and his mother share the same facial structure, twinkling eyes and soft smile.

He credits Rosanna for their good life and successful careers in education, despite the disruptions of his youth.

But he remembers family whispers about calls to his grandparents' house on May 30. That's his birthday. His first mother remembered.